Report No....
COM.21.
8
Continuation No..
Kong with any power except those appointed by the Governor and therefore, we have nothing to strive for, they can take action or fail to take action according to their own whims. But when you have representatives of the people, then they either get on with the job or get out.
Narrator: Mrs. Elliott is an urban Councillor but has to fight outside the Council Chamber .In 1966, she came to London to organise a Royal Commission into Hong Kong she failed, but she's tenacious. Here she tackles the police
about hawkers.
There are sixty thousand hawkers in Hong Kong, mobile street traders who sell their goods on the pavements. To be legal, they need a licence to walk round with their goods but if all of them walked around, the streets would be jammed, so in some areas, hawkers are allowed to set their stalls down. Mrs. Elliott: It's quite an established fact that a hawker can do anything he likes provided he's paid his bribe, there's a great deal of bribery going on in Hong Kong and the hawkers with licences find it much more difficult to operate than those
who have no licences at all because of bribery.
Interviewer:
What happens if a hawker doesn't pay this money? Mrs. Elliott: Well he's issued with summonses for obstruction
and he has to go before the court and in many cases he's actually arrested and taken before the court.
Narrator: Hum Mey, an old Chinese woman, had a stall outside the temple where she sold oil.
Mrs. Elliott: She was arrested for selling in a place where hawkers are not supposed to sell, but she had a very small stall, only about four feet by one and a half feet and as she said
she'd been there for about twenty years. When I went to see her a few days ago I found that some other person had put up a bigger · stall on the place where she had been operating and the police
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